During their stay at Beauclair Castle in Toussaint, Angoulême has a wintery surprise for her Hansa.

"Angoulême, come inside, now! Before you're frozen stiff! It's almost dark anyway," Milva shouts at the top of her voice from a small window in the castle's wall. Below, in the kitchen garden, she can spot the bulky outline of a small figure clad in a double coat and big boots moving around in the snow doing something, but it is too dark and far away to see what.

"Almost done, aunty!" the flaxen-haired girl shouts back. Milva closes the window again, only slightly annoyed by the hated moniker. She is curious, but Angoulême has asked her not to look, and the archer is no spoilsport. Maybe, at dinner, she can coax something out of her. It might be worth a try.

When the girl is finally standing in the doorway of the kitchen of Beauclair Castle, her cheeks are red like apples and her lips have a bluish hue. She shivers from the cold.

"Off with that coat and those boots and move your butt over here, punk, to the fireplace," Milva orders, grabbing the girl by the arm and dragging her inside the comfortably warm kitchen. While Angoulême does as told without protesting - probably because her lips are too frozen to talk -, Milva pours her a cup of warm elderberry juice with cinnamon.

"Here, sit and drink this, so you won't catch cold. The soup'll be ready in a minute."

Having gotten rid of her two layers of fur coats and the borrowed, too big boots, Angoulême plops down on the bench and takes the mug with the steaming juice from Milva's hand.

"Careful, it's hot!" Milva warns, picking up the boots and putting them next to the fireplace to dry. Then she shoos the speckled hen off the coats the girl has dropped on the kitchen floor in a big pile. Normally, she would not tidy up Angoulême's clutter but give her a piece of her mind about making such a mess instead. However, seeing how pitifully frozen the girl is, an exception is in order, just this once.

Then the elderly cook, who has somehow taken a shine to the strange fellowship that is Geralt's Hansa, brings a pot of pumpkin soup, and Milva fills first Angoulême's bowl and then her own. It is the first time the two women are all alone for dinner, with Geralt busy doing what he calls research in the library with Fringilla, Jaskier warming the Duchess's bed, Regis, as it is a full moon night, frolicking - or whatever else they do - with the succubus, and Cahir not back yet from a day spent with the knight errants. Last time he was out with them, allegedly to secure the borders, he came back very late and very drunk, so Milva does not expect to see her non-Nilfgaardian friend before morning.

Angoulême puts down her now empty mug.

"Thank you, aunty," she sighs, "you saved my life!" Her lips are nicely red again and she has stopped shivering.

"Next time I won't, if you keep calling me that. You know I hate it," Milva chides. "I should give you a good walloping for it! And for being so stupid to get yourself all frozen in the first place! What's with the secrecy anyway?"

"A secret's a secret," Angoulême says, slurping the first spoonful of soup and not at all impressed by Milva's threats. "You'll see in the morning. When the others are back."

And this is all Milva finds out the entire evening, although the two have a lot of fun together and Milva tries several times to trick her young friend into blabbing, with zero success. Well, she could have given the girl mulled wine instead of juice to make her spill her secret. But getting the teenager drunk would have been unethical, and Angoulême's fisstech habit is bad enough already. She does not need an alcohol problem on top of it. As a proficient hunter, Milva is pretty good at being patient anyway.

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As usual, the Hansa are having a long and rather late breakfast in the palace kitchen the next morning. On Angoulême's special request, Geralt and Jaskier have left their lovers behind and come to join them. A truly rare occurrence. Jaskier still looks half asleep and yawns heartily every two minutes or so, but in contrast to Cahir, who has not eaten anything at all, he is helping himself to a gracious portion of scrambled eggs, provided by the kitchen's chickens, and several slices of freshly baked bread.

"So, Angoulême," he asks eventually, his mouth full of bread and eggs, "what's up? You've been acting like you've got ants in your pants all morning."

"The little punk wants to show us something. A secret," Milva explains dryly. "A very well-kept one."

"Is that so?" Regis arches his brow, amused. After a very pleasurable night with his succubus girlfriend, he is in an excellent mood, and he loves secrets. "Then, may I suggest we finish up here quickly? Before the poor girl bursts with impatience and excitement, yes?"

Jaskier nods, swiftly stuffing the remaining eggs and bread into his mouth and downing it with a long draught of beer.

"Alright, little rascal, where is that secret of yours?" Geralt asks while Jaskier is still swallowing. The Witcher rises from the bench, his mug in his hand, and takes a last gulp of hot tea. Then he puts his mug back on the table with a thud. "Hopefully it's not something illegal, like a crate full of moonshine or fisstech, or shrunken cannibal heads."

"Nah, it's much better, nuncle, so much better!" Angoulême says with a mischievous grin, impatiently hopping from one foot to the other. Finally she can show them. She cannot wait to see their faces. "Follow me, Hansa!" she yells like a general and rushes to the door, grabbing her fur coat on the way out.

Cahir groans, holding his head, Angoulême's loud voice reverberating in his throbbing skull. He puts down the big mug of Regis's extra bitter hangover tea that he has been sipping at for the last hour or so and looks at Milva miserably.

"Sorry, no dodging," the archer says firmly, shaking her head and grabbing him by the hand. "It's your own fault, and the fresh air—."

"—might do you good, my boy," Regis finishes Milva's sentence, as he so often does. "The effect of the tea should kick in any time now. You'll soon feel a lot better, you'll see. And no alcohol in the next couple of days, barber-surgeon's orders."

Cahir nods and scrambles to his feet, stifling another groan. Milva and Regis are probably right, they usually are, and despite his aching skull, the nausea and sensitivity to light and sound, he is curious what this secret is about.

They see it soon enough. And what they find in the garden between the leafless fruit trees is a surprise indeed, one that makes them goggle for a brief moment. Then they break into laughter. Even Cahir cannot help grinning. For there they are, the Hansa, almost life-sized cast in snow. The biggest, rather grim-looking snowman is wearing a headband and two long sticks on his back like swords. His shoulders and gloves are studded not with silver but with beechnuts. Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, to a tee. The snowman next to him has an old, ragged hat on his head with a long, tattered pheasant feather that might have been rakish once upon a time, and his mouth is wide open as if he was singing at the top of his lungs. Then there is a rather thin snowman with an apron made of a mosaic of acorns and pine cones, a snowwoman holding a makeshift bow and sticks for arrows, a smaller snow girl with a moth-eaten pompom hat and a short stick in her hand that is supposed to stand in for a dagger, and, last but not least, a snowman with a stick for a sword in his hand and a blackened, leaky pot on its head. Two rumpled raven feathers are sticking out of the pot's sides. With some imagination, it bears an uncanny likeness to a Nilfgaardian commander's helmet.

"This, my dearest friends, is true art!" Regis exclaims when he has recovered from his laughing fit. Grinning like a pixy troll, Angoulême throws a snowball at the higher vampire. It misses its mark as Regis has vanished into thin air just in time, and hits Jaskier right in the face instead. The bard splutters, then grabs a handful of snow and tosses it at the proud snow-sculptor. Soon, the comrades all throw snowballs at each other, giggling and laughing, and rolling in the snow until their faces, hands and feet are frozen blue. Cahir's hangover has miraculously vanished.

Time to say good-bye to their funny, snowy dopplers and get back into the warm kitchen for a second breakfast. For there is nothing better than a breakfast in Beauclair with their Hansa.